


and when you cross that bridge

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen | Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Genre: Amnesia, F/F, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-04 07:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12765831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: There's been something missing for as long as Misaki can remember.





	and when you cross that bridge

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the BCL Christmas Exchange 2016. The exchange is running again this year, incidentally! Come and join us on [Beyond the Camera's Lens](http://bcl.rpen.us/community/index.php?/topic/2139-christmas-exchange-2017-signups/) and the [AO3 collection](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/bcl_exchange2017) for a spoooooky Christmas gift.

Her first birthday back, some relative gives Misaki a doll. It comes in a decorated box full of soft tissue paper, and for a moment when she opens it up and sees the light shining on its glass eyes, she feels — recognition. Relief. It's as if she's been lost for hours, and night is coming, and suddenly she sees a familiar place.

All that morning she hugs the doll against her chest and won't let it go. She almost forgets she has it, it feels so much a part of her. Then she happens to glance down, and the shock of seeing its shining golden curls and vapid blue eyes is so strong it's almost revulsion. It's wrong, all wrong. She hurls it into the corner, and then cries, because her arms feel so empty.

When her mother comes and turns the doll over and offers it back to her, there's an ugly crack where its face struck the wall. Even as she grows up, she still thinks of that cracked face sometimes, presses at the memory like a bruise. It makes her feel ill, but there's something about it she can't put aside.

There are always things like that, punctuating her life. Shapes in a fogged-up pane of glass. A painting of a woman in a white dress sitting on a bed, calm and pensive and remote. A girl dancing through a shaft of pale sunlight, her long hair spreading like a raven's wing. There's been something missing for as long as Misaki can remember, and that's not a figure of speech. The first memory she has — before the woman she didn't recognise as her mother swept her up into a painfully tight embrace, before the detective led her out into the open air, before the moon swallowed her up — the very first memory is of crying for something lost.

She tells the doctor once, and he says it's the natural response to losing her memories, but that doesn't feel right. When she got home after her ordeal, as her mother always insists on calling it, she soon stopped trying to remember her childhood. Sometimes she wished she could, but only because she knew it would make her parents happy. That part of her life is a blank space. She's never missed it. It doesn't hurt to think that it's gone.

But the missing piece, that never stops hurting. It's as if, every once in a while, her heart forgets to beat, and the absence of it leaves her shaken. Other things get easier, but this never does.

* * *

Someone is talking to her in the dark of her room. She can't see them, can't even tell what they're saying, but the words have a lilting cadence that's achingly familiar, and terribly sad. She tries to answer, and the sound of her own voice wakes her up.

She knows at once that Tomoe and Marie are dead. She knows that, in their separate beds, Madoka and Ruka have woken up too. Through the gap in her blinds, she can see the August full moon leering at her, yellow and ripe as a plum, the kind wasps fly out of when you kick it.

The world doesn't feel real. Instinctively she reaches out in her mind for the one unchanging thing, the anchor she knows should be there — only it's not, and there's the sickening, dizzying absence again. It's bad tonight, worse than it's ever been. There should be someone else, not Ruka or Madoka but someone like her, someone to stabilise and steady her, or drag her into oblivion so she won't have to feel like this any more. There was someone, once.

That's when she knows she has to go back. It's not a choice, and it's not about Marie and Tomoe, no matter what she tells Madoka. She can't get through another ten years with this feeling. If she loses everything else, she has to know.

* * *

She expects to find completion on the island, the final piece of the puzzle. She should have known it wouldn't be so simple.

She can't tell when her perspective started to change. Maybe it was in that high, lonely, moonlit room, which had seemed palatial to a child and felt uncomfortably bare and cold to Misaki now. Maybe it was trying to fit together the fragments of words scrawled on the pages of the red diary, or looking down at the painting of the faceless figure in red. Maybe it was all the way back in the library, when she saw that woman, those rags of shadow in the shape of a woman. She didn't remember then — except that part of her did. She felt it.

She expected to find the one thing that would make her whole again, and instead she found a person even more broken than she is. All this time she thought she was the one reaching out for something she needed, when it was the other way around.

Miya. Sakuya.

She cries, with the doll in her arms, filling the emptiness. She cries for them both, for the forgotten childhood she never knew to miss, and for Sakuya's wasted life. For everything they both had taken from them, and for the years they've spent alone. They really are the same.

 _You've remembered._ The meaning comes without words, opens in her mind like a flower. She feels the embrace as cool water enveloping her, and there is light, and a sense of falling, and a feeling of coming home.

In an eternity of nothingness, they are together. Misaki knows from the pull of the moon that the real world is _that way_ , only it's not like there's any real direction here. There isn't any 'here'. She's somewhere deep in her mind, or inside Miya, outside time and the world.

"Soon it'll be over," Sakuya says. "You'd better sleep here until then. It will be worse if there are two of us, and I won't let them use you."

"What about you?"

She feels the feather-light flutter of Sakuya in her mind, smiling sadly, turning away. She forgot what it was like to connect to someone like this; she can't lose it now.

She reaches out — it's easier to imagine it as a physical movement, catching at a physical being. When the oscillations of light and sound become hard to bear, it helps to picture wrapping her arms around Sakuya and holding her, feeling the soft tangle of her hair and the warmth of her skin.

"What's going to happen?"

"I don't know," Sakuya says thoughtfully. "I think it'll be a sound. Loud enough to shatter the world. I'll climb until the moon can whisper it through me."

She talks like Ruka at her most obscure — worse than Ruka. It seems more than unfair that now they've found each other again, they still won't be able to talk properly. She wants to know what Sakuya was like before the island took her mind.

Perhaps Sakuya senses something of that. With a phenomenal effort she composes herself, and the flickering sense of her coalesces briefly into something bright and almost steady, though Misaki never stops feeling that fundamental instability. It keeps tugging at her, trying to warp her in turn.

"Let's meet again," Sakuya says. "When it's over, if anything's left, we'll find each other."

Misaki moves closer to the light of her and feels, just for a moment, that calm presence she used to reach for as a child. She tries to give back a little of that memory of peace. She tries to call up a place for them, somewhere safe and far away, but the only place she can think of is Sakuya's room at Rougetsu Hall, its windows full of the empty sky. She can smell dust and dead flowers.

"I wish I could make something better."

They're on the bed, holding hands, just like any two people about to be parted. In her red kimono, with her dark hair framing her face, Sakuya looks pale, so young and solemn and real that Misaki leans in and kisses the corner of her mouth before she can stop to think about what she's doing. When she pulls back, Sakuya touches her cheek and smiles a little.

"As long as you remember me," she says. Her expression clouds, as if she can't remember how she meant to finish. "As long as you remember me..."

Sleep is tugging at Misaki like an undertow, but she fights to stay awake. Even if it's not perfect, if she can trust her memory at all, she wants to memorise this.

"Even if I forget myself..."

"I won't forget this time. I promise."

"Then..."

But she trails off, and doesn't speak again. The moon is calling — for Misaki it feels far away. Finally, Sakuya puts her arms around Misaki, Misaki lets herself be drawn down into the darkness. She wonders if she'll ever wake up.


End file.
